Barnaby Wainfan designed a radically different lifting body light aircraft over 30 years ago, that exhibited superior performance in almost every metric: speed, lifting capacity, interior volume, stall performance and centre of gravity tolerance. It’s also cheap and easy to build.

His designs are much talked about at the annual Oshkosh fly in for aviation enthusiasts, yet major aircraft manufacturers seem to be allergic to his innovations.

Despite advantages in almost every metric relevant to light aircraft design, the industry appears wedded to conventional wings and fuselage design.

* * *

Want to watch this podcast as a video? End of the Line is available on engineering.com TV along with all of our other shows such as This Week in Engineering, Designing the Future, and, Manufacturing the Future.